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Sound
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Value
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The final tab is the Job Center, where you can browse all of the available jobs on the market. There are opportunities in Security, Food, Legal, Science, Music, Medicine, Acting, Journalism, Computing and Other. The postings vary day to day, and each job has specific requirements that need to be filled (for example, a guitarist gig often requires both the ability to play guitar and on-stage experience).
Now, before your fingertips go numb from choice-paralysis, you should know that Kudos is considerably more structured than I have lead you to believe. As previously stated, Kudos is a turn-based game. One turn equals one day, and in one day you can do two activities, for two halves of the day. On top of this, your job counts as one activity. You can choose one activity per day on weekdays, and two on Saturday and Sunday. As a result, the balancing of Night School classes, social gatherings with friends, and alone time becomes quite a formidable challenge. The days really fly by, and before you know it, your web of relationships will have taken on an entirely new structure. Such is life, and Kudos does well simulating this reality. There’s a Fly on My Screen! If you didn’t gather this from the previous section, most all of the management in Kudos occurs on one screen. A large, static close-up of your avatar fills the background. A smaller, frontal body shot of your avatar stands on the middle right of the screen. And a web extending from the body displays your friends as thumbnail images. The body shot changes with respect to changes in your mood, and behind the close-up image is the weather, which varies day to day and includes animations of rain and snow. This is practically the full extent of the Kudos’ visuals. They are neither captivating, nor detracting, and really just serve to present the information together, in a logical fashion. In addition, an extended period of play reveals another visual effect—the soiling of the playing screen. At first practically unnoticeable, this visual reaches full effect when an eerily realistic animated housefly appears on screen and begins to scurry around. Honestly, I tried to brush the intrusive bugger off my screen at least two times before realizing that it was inside the computer, and not on top of it. Before I knew what to make of this, more flies appeared, and I began to wonder if my copy of the game was indeed “buggy.” After several irritating minutes of suppressing my life-learned instinct to swat the intruders, I discovered that their presence corresponded to my lack of house cleaning, a solo activity I had neglected for some time. This is perhaps the weirdest aspect of Kudos, and I’m not quite sure if it jives with the rest of the game experience. In addition to this, several graphical errors caught my attention during game play. Words overlapped each other, texts did not fit in the buttons they were supposed to occupy, and strange symbols followed certain words (possibly from using a font which doesn’t support certain characters). All of these errors seem to be characteristic of a sloppy port process, but I have not played the PC version of Kudos, so this is only speculation. Either way, these blemishes are inexcusable in the final version of a product, especially for a title that is already graphically minimalist. This demonstrates a lack of respect for the consumer; not a good way to sell games.
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